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There's thousands of blogs, tutorials, and YouTube videos on how to write if statements and for loops. There's thousands of different recommendations on good practices and what it means to write "good code" but the truth is, I was coding for a long time before I had any idea how many tools there were out there. So this blog post is for the newbie programmer. I'm going to recommend some tools for you and explain what they're for. Maybe you'll be smarter than me, and start using them early on in your career. Everything I'm listing here is free. Yes, there are pay versions of some of these products, but I'm linking you to free downloads, because coding isn't about waiting until you get a job. Start using these at home today. They will make your career.

Your pencil and paper, the Text Editor:
The text editor is your sketchpad, your quick note taker, and your spare code storage. Every programmer has his or her favorite. The important thing …

So a few weeks back, I checked in over 600 files worth of code in one day, and it occurred to me that that was a lot. Why so much? I was reorganizing code that was scattered about one large project into multiple projects so that it would build as libraries and so that there was some semblance of sanity to the location of things like objects and methods.

I know that I'm a fast programmer, but I think other people believe that I spend all day at the keyboard sweating trying to get that much code in, and that simply isn't true. So here's my tips on how to work smarter, not harder, and get a lot of code on the books.

I should note that all of these screen shots I'll be presenting were taken during the actual exercise of cleaning and reorganizing code. These are not "examples" or "samples" but actual code in a real environment. The things I'm showing here are the actual things I did in the course of building the 600 files that I checked in.